Desmond Tutu |
January 22, 1986
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Desmond Tutu
Bishop of Johannesburg, South Africa; Nobel Laureate, Nobel Peace Prize 1984; Former Secretary General of the South African Council of Churches
Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your invitation to speak at this august gathering, and thank you also for your very warm welcome. Sometimes when you get introduced in meetings of this kind, it is useful, for the sake of the size of your head, that you remember a little story that's told of how - you know - ministers of religion usually really go to town in their praise of the deceased. A man died, and at his funeral the minister certainly did go to town, and his wife was heard to turn to her son and say in a stage whisper, "I think we've come to the wrong funeral."
There's a story that is told of a drunk who accosted a pedestrian and said to him, "I say, which is the other side of the street?" And the pedestrian, somewhat nonplussed, said, "That side, of course." And the drunk retorted, "Well, strange - When I was on that side they said it was this side."
"The other side of the street" depends very much on where you are. What you see, what you perceive is determined very, very largely by who you are, by your experiences which have helped to form you. And this is very clearly illustrated in South Africa, where, almost as an axiom you could say that what pleases most whites is almost certainly going to displease most blacks; and what pleases most blacks will almost certainly do the opposite for most whites. The perceptions are quite, quite different, as if of people inhabiting different planets, different worlds.
1985, Christmas was decreed in our community to be a "black Christmas." When you ask most white South Africans, they will tell you that it was utterly unnecessary that there should have been any trouble at all, because the government is reforming. It has, after all, repealed the law prohibiting marriage between whites and people of other races, and that which makes it a criminal offense for sexual intercourse to take place between whites and people of other races. Have they not now said that they will have a common citizenship for all South Africans, and even universal suffrage? Has the government not already produced a new constitution, which, for the first time in the history of South Africa, makes provision for persons who are not white to participate in the highest assembly of the land, share in the business of legislating? Why, there are now "non-whites" in coats in the cabinet of the central government. At local government level many black African townships are now run by their own freely elected black city/town councils, and the government intends, so we're told, to open the President's Council to include black African members. Admittedly, this council is not a legislative body, but it can suggest possible legislation and can adjudicate when there is a dispute between the different chambers of the tricameral parliament.
It should be noted as well, that most sport in South Africa, so they will tell you, is now no longer segregated; and many business companies are implementing various codes of conduct such as the EEC code and the American Sullivan Principles, which have led to considerable improvements in the work conditions of blacks and an enhancement of their quality of life, shown in their vastly improved housing, in their possession of expensive cars, in their ability to send their children to expensive private schools. Why, now at work most segregation has disappeared! Blacks share the same toilet and canteen facilities with their white work-mates. Their chances of upward mobility have improved considerably, and it is "same pay for the same work" in most companies. So, the foreign companies, who are told ad nauseam are a power for good in their enlightened policies, are important trailblazers, helping bring about change in South Africa. This is supposed to justify their presence in our land. That is the perception of most whites.
The perception of most blacks is almost the direct opposite of this. It is as if we inhabit different planets. We look at what purports to be the same reality, and our perceptions are quite different. Most blacks will say that many of the so-called reforms which make whites so ecstatic are really cosmetic: they deal only with peripheral issues. The harsh reality of apartheid remains as oppressive, as ruthless, as immoral, as evil, as un-Christian as it ever was. Why is it good for the few who are interested in interracial marriage that the relevant laws prohibiting this have been repealed? This, in the nature of the case, will be only very few people. The legislative pillars of apartheid remain firmly in place. South Africans are still classified according to race as if we're prize animals. According to the Population Registration Act, those who are white remain, as always, the most privileged, at the top of the racial pyramid, and other races are arranged in hierarchical stratification, with diminishing rights, below the all-powerful white oligarchy, until you reach the broad base of the pyramid, representing the vast majority of this land, the black indigenous inhabitants with minimal rights.
South Africans still inhabit their segregated residential areas in terms of the Group Areas Act, which is still very much in place; the whites, again, occupying the most salubrious, well-planned, usually affluent suburbs, with standard recreational and other facilities, whilst the other races live in areas that are decidedly of a lower quality, usually, than those occupied by whites - until you reach the bottom of the pile, in the black ghetto townships that you have grown used to in the TV images: monotonous row after monotonous row of identical, match-box houses in ill-lit, often dusty, unpaved streets, areas that normally lack the most rudimentary amenities, which in the other parts are taken for granted.
In most of these areas, blacks still do not have free-hold title, for they have been regarded as only temporary birds of passage in the white man's urban areas - tolerated, as long as they are able-bodied and fit to work. When they could not work any more, then they were considered to be discards, what a former cabinet minister carelessly described as "superfluous appendages" - referring to our aged mothers and fathers, who used to work for their white employers, now to be discarded as if they were useless chattels, useless things, not human beings of infinite value because they were created in the image of God as everybody else.
Even in the time of reform - which, we are told, this is the era of reform - over 150,000 blacks have fallen foul of the passed laws in l984. Blacks still do not have the right of moving freely in the land of their birth. The passed laws were also still firmly in place despite the promise that Dr. Piet Koornof, at that time a member of the government and now chairman of the President's Council, that the government has declared war on the dompas. This was the same gentleman who, a few years ago, had declared in America that apartheid is dead. No one has yet seen fit to invite us to the funeral, and this corpse was certainly still able to inflict much untold suffering and anguish to many of God's children unnecessarily.
You thought of how the Nazis had treated the Jews when you looked at some of the treatment meted out to blacks. This is the only country that I know in the world where it is a crime for a national to look for work, if his or her past is not in order. Blacks were "birds of passage" because they were, after all, to be citizens of spuriously independent bantustan homelands, most of whom had not seen nor known of these homelands until the white man had, in his wisdom and greed, had decreed they belonged to. So they were turned into aliens in the land of their birth because an alien cannot claim many rights, least of all political rights. That is why, for a while, I traveled not on a South African passport but on a document that described my nationality.
Now, when you look at me, knowing that I am born in South Africa, you'd say it is obvious that I am a South African. And I have said to some people, "I'm obviously as South African as a Krugerrand." But this document described my nationality in these words: "Undeterminable at present."
The initial response to that ought to be laughter, because it is ridiculous in the extreme. But I think that the response, more seriously, ought to be far more somber, because this represents the South African government's final solution - and you know the sinister connotations of "final solution."
Now, I do have a South African passport which says I am a South African citizen, but one with no political rights at all. To satisfy their racist political ideology, the minority government has uprooted three and a half million people and dumped them, as if they were rubbish, in the poverty-stricken, arid bantustan resettlement camps, where children starve, not because there's no food in South Africa. Children starve not accidentally: children starve by deliberate government policy, because South Africa is normally a net exporter of food. The father has to leave his family, eking out a miserable existence in those bantustan resettlement camps, whilst, if he is lucky, he goes to be a migrant worker in the white man's town, to live for 11 months of the year separated from his family, and he lives in a single-sex hostel. The migratory labor system, which even the white Dutch Reformed Church, which is not noted for being quick to condemn the present government, condemned long ago as a cancer in our society - that migratory labor system is very firmly in place in this time of reform.
Thus, black family life is undermined not accidentally but by deliberate government policy. It would be a crime if the migrant worker's wife were to join him. This is the only country in the world that I know of where it is a crime for a man to sleep with his wife. This in Christian South Africa, lauded by many as the last bastion, the last bulwark against Soviet expansionism and communism; this in Christian South Africa, which used to have (you won't believe it) a public holiday to attest to the sanctity of family life, a holiday called Family Day; this, in a land that upholds the Christian principle that declares about marriage, "What God has joined together let no man put asunder."
In the time of reform, the government has not let up on its policy of forced population removals, so that it is determined to move the people of Malagazi, which is a black settlement which has been in the news, because a number of people have been killed. The people there have resisted being moved, sliced out of one bantustan to which they had been told they belonged to, and quite arbitrarily, cynically, being told that now they are going to belong to another one. And the people have resisted this, and the people have been killed.
In the time of reform, our black children still receive an inferior education, really a travesty intended by its architect to be an education for perpetual serfdom, and which our children rejected so forcefully in l976, and which they still reject today. Then, to cap it all, in 1984 the government introduced a new constitution which was hailed in many quarters as a step in the right direction. They said this of a constitution which deliberately excluded 73 percent of the population, the blacks, from any share in the decision-making processes of a tricameral parliament, which was meant to hoodwink the international community into believing that South Africa was now reforming. How could this monstrosity be declared a step in the right direction when it was a step away from democracy? In that new constitution, l984 vintage, blacks are mentioned in only one sentence; thereafter we cease to exist.
This constitution represents a co-opting of Indians and so-called "coloreds" to be junior partners in apartheid, collaborators in their own oppression and that of their black fellow-victims. The ratio in the parliamentary committee was to be four whites to two coloreds to one Indian. Now, even if your math was very bad, you realize that two plus one will never equal, let alone be more than, four. And so the constitution perpetuates white minority oppression. It was this constitution which blacks interpreted as meaning that the politics of exclusion had now reached its nadir, and which, as such, they rejected - and that was the start of the unrest in August 1984 and which has gone on until now, and which has claimed over 1000 lives.
Unrest has proved to be endemic. You have seen what happened portrayed on your television screen. Peaceful protest has become virtually impossible. The government at last imposed a state of emergency on most of South Africa, and placed the army in black townships. The security forces have been vicious. You saw how they used a decoy system, hiding in crates to lure people to stone them; and when they did, the soldiers emerged from those boxes with guns blazing.
They have detained thousands. My own son was detained for 14 days, under the emergency regulations, for swearing at a policeman. Now, how does that constitute a threat to the state? Young children have been arrested and detained, even 14-year-olds and younger. Just now, a 14-year-old has been in detention for five months, incommunicado. He has not had access to his family; he has not had access to a lawyer. And then the state president has made interesting speeches, and disappointed the world with his "Rubicon" speech, where he was truculent and threatening; instead of a being a statesman, he behaved like a cheap party hack. He has made promises which we would have found interesting, indeed dramatic, a few years ago; they have remained interesting remarks because our government are past masters at playing semantic games. He said "common citizenship," and, just as we were getting excited, we discover it will be within the apartheid parameters and it will be citizenship without political power. He said "universal suffrage," and just when we say, "Ah! They're beginning to talk," you discover they don't mean what the rest of the world thinks they mean.
The point, dear friends, is that until South Africa deals with the issue of political power-sharing, we are just playing marbles. The EEC code and the other code are unacceptable, because they are fundamentally ameliorative. They are designed to effect "improvements." Now, we don't want apartheid improved - we want it removed; we want it dismantled. You can't reform apartheid. We don't want our chains - as Mrs. Motlana put it, "We don't want our chains made more comfortable. We want our chains removed." And our last chance for peaceful change, friends, for true reconciliation, which will come with repentance and justice, is if the international community is ready to apply effective political, diplomatic, but above all economic pressure. The foreign companies have, consciously or unconsciously, helped to buttress apartheid by their investments in our land. They did little before the pressure of the dis-investment campaign caused them to find ways of justifying their presence in South Africa.
It is not the height of my ambition to share a toilet with a white person: I want to be recognized for what I am - a human person created in God's image, and a citizen of my land of birth. I mean it must be odd, that I, bishop of an important diocese of our church in South Africa, a Nobel laureate, 54 years of age, should not vote in my motherland; and yet the whites, and, more recently, colored and Indian, 18 years old, can vote. The foreign companies are doing no more than being good employers, and we must not be churlish: there have been extensive improvements that have taken place. But what they have been doing is to extend to their black employees the conditions which for several years they were applying only to their white employees.
I hear people say: But if sanctions are applied, the first people to suffer are blacks. Blacks have two answers. One is a nice-ish answer: they say, "Well, you see, we are suffering now; we have been suffering; and if it means that the one way in which we are going to end this system is to take on additional suffering, then so be it." A slightly less nice answer is to say, "When did people become so altruistic? Did they not benefit from black cheap and black migratory labor? Did they ever protest against these and other causes of black suffering?"
Our people have recently in two surveys shown what they want. Both surveys indicate that over 70 percent of the blacks want sanctions of some sort to be applied. It is the last chance for reasonably peaceful change. And let me just say: We're not asking you to make a political decision; we're not asking you, in fact, even to make an economic decision. We're asking you to make a moral decision. We're asking you to say, are you on the side of justice or injustice? Are you on the side of oppression or of liberation? For in a situation of injustice and oppression, there can be no neutrality. For if you say you are neutral you have already made a decision: you have opted to support the status quo.
The year in our country ended with land mines and bomb blasts. We have said ad nauseam, we oppose all violence as evil - that of a repressive system, and that of those who want to overthrow it. But you can change a political system only in three ways. You can vote those out of office you don't want. We can't use that method, because we can't vote. You can use violence to overthrow the government. We still say we don't want to do this. We want a South Africa for all its people, black and white, where we will live amicably together as God intended us, as members of one family, the human family, God's family.
And so we ask, will you please help us? Will you please help us so that we can create this new South Africa, where people will count, not because of a biological irrelevance, the color of their skin - where people will count because they are of infinite worth, created in the image of God.
And is this not ultimately doing good business? Because, you see, we are going to be free; we have no doubt at all in our minds. We will be free and remain all of us because until all of us are free in South Africa, no one will be free, truly free. We are going to be free. And there is no way in which you can say what happens in South Africa does not concern you. The late Senator Church, when he was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate, said to me on Capitol Hill once, "You know, Bishop Tutu, why America must be concerned about what happens in South Africa is not because of our financial involvement in South Africa, for it is piffling in relation to our total foreign investment - it's only something in the region of about 1 percent. Why we must be concerned is that, if a race war were to break out in South Africa, it would have the most horrendous consequences for race relations in this country."
He could have gone on to say that it would have the most horrendous repercussions for race relations in most of Western Europe, because there are large constituencies of Third World people there.
We thank you for all your support, in prayer, in love and concern, in money and in other ways. We shall be free, because the God of justice and peace and reconciliation is with us. We would like to be able, when we are free, to say that the people of America made the right choice; they backed the right horse.
Thank you.
Generously funded by:
Tom Campbell
Dee Dee Myers